Okay, so I know I was bitching about the Favre coverage earlier in the week. I know I need to get over it. As Sonny told me tonight, “It’s a league full of bad quarterbacks…if he wants to play, he will.”

Yeah, I know, I get it. But still…if there’s so LITTLE going on in the sports world, why can’t we just not have coverage of anything for a couple of days? This 24-hour news cycle idea has always been a bullshit concoction by the mainstream media in order to falsely drive up overnight advertising rates. We don’t need a 24-hour news cycle. It’d be perfectly acceptable to mainstream America if we just didn’t report on stories (or debate them to death) for a couple of weeks during the summertime.

Instead, the media apparently feels the need to trumpet this idiotic Favre quasi-sorta-maybenot-retirement story in every outlet this week, every HOUR of every day. Blogs, TV, cable, talk radio, newspapers…everyone has been equally guilty. And it’s stupid. Hell, just by bitching about it, I’m helping to perpetuate it right here on TMC, which either makes me equally guilty (and equally stupid), or just a big hypocrite.

But, come on. Look at this:

- Rick Morrissey prostituting the Chicago Bears to Favre.

- A full 1500 words about why Favre might NOT end up in Carolina (with stupid reasoning to boot! I mean…Jake Delhomme? Seriously?).

- Greg Cote with some meaningless “Favre to Miami” blather that he can talk up on LeBatard’s show, in between calls from fake people.

- EMQB aghast at Favre going anywhere other than Green Bay.

- The Detroit Free Press guy doesn’t want Favre because he’d “be killed” (always a possibility in Detroit, you have to admit).

- A truly bizarre article from the Baltimore Sun, including the mention of albino ravens. Huh?

Anyway, you get the picture. There are at least 30 more links like this from today, all of them concentrating in some way, shape, or form on Favre and his employment status.

In the words of a great man, “Gentlemen, this has to stop.” It’s one thing to look for something to write about on a slow news day; we’ve all done that, with varying degrees of success. But writing about Favre’s retirement status is drifting dangerously close to meme territory…it’s the same phenomenon that we saw throughout the 1990’s involving the media and Bob Knight. You could always tell when a sports columnist had run out of ideas — the next day, there would be a Knight-bashing column in the paper. Boom, problem solved.

We’re on a path of no return to total embarrassment with this Favre story. Everyone needs to get it together. Stat.